I look at Phoebe, but she is watching the doctor, her mouth half open in a wary-looking underbite.
“It might take you some time to adjust,” the doctor goes on. “You might even feel some grief over the loss of what you thought you were. Over the cat. In time, you might feel some regret, maybe, for things you did that you would not have done had you understood you were not a cat. Catlike decisions you made that wouldn’t be appropriate for dogs. And if there was medication that could help you feel more like the thing you really are, then you might want to try it. Am I making sense?”
“Your father’s had a nervous breakdown,” Phoebe says, like she’s summing up what the doctor means. “The medication calmed him down, then it gave him a seizure, so now they have to find something else.”
“Nervous breakdown is really not a term we use anymore,” says the doctor.
“Manic depression,” I offer.
The doctor is pleased with this. He smiles at me like I, myself, am a cat, or a dog, who has started using human speech. “Close enough,” he says. “Smart girl. Come again on Monday. I’m confident he’ll be feeling a lot better.”
Phoebe lifts her hands into the air by her face, like she gives up, then lets them fall to her thighs with a slap. “Okay,” she says to the room in general. She pushes herself to her feet, and we follow the doctor into the hall. There, the crying gets louder again. It sounds like a man saying “No, oh no.” I lag behind Phoebe and the doctor, and when I reach a door where the sound seems to be coming from, I try the handle as quietly as I can. Then I try it harder.
“Charmaine,” Phoebe says, spinning on her heel.
Then I’m knocking on the door, banging on it. The crying stops for a second, then picks up again under the sounds of my fist. There’s a voice too. A murmur over the crying. “You locked him in?” I say.
“That’s not your father,” says the doctor. “It’s another patient, seeing another doctor. And it’s not locked, it’s just latched.”
“It is locked,” I say, gripping the handle. “Dad,” I say into the door. Then I get down on my hands and knees and speak into the inch of space underneath it. “Dad, open the door.”
“It’s not him,” says the doctor, striding toward me.
“Charmaine, get up,” says Phoebe.
“Maybe he saw us pull in,” I say to Phoebe. “Maybe he saw you come in with Doctor Osborne.”
“That’s enough,” Phoebe says. To the doctor she says, “Our car broke down again this afternoon. Charmaine, get up now.”
The doctor tries to lift me from my armpits, but I wrench him off. “It’s not your dad,” he says again. He places one of his hands on my back. “Listen. The medication won’t let him cry like that. It won’t let him feel bad at all. It gives him a little break from feeling bad. From feeling much of anything, really.”
I grope around in the butt purse for the letters I’ve torn from my freewriting notebook, and I find my pen, and I fold the pages in half and write Dad on the outside and slide them under the door, not even thinking that I should write his name instead—David Peake. Then while I have my pen out, I make another hatch mark on my hand and I pray again, without ceasing, all the way down the stairs, then back down the bright hallway on the first floor, then while we wait, the three of us, under the porte-cochère for Dr. Osborne’s car.
I pray most of the way home, too, trying to replace the sound of crying with the words in my head. Dr. Osborne says nothing to Phoebe about our interaction in the lobby. He just asks how my father is, how David is, in his low voice meant for the front seat only.
Phoebe stares out over the fields. I get through the prayer three times before she answers.
“It’s hard to say,” is what she finally says. Then she takes a deep breath. “It certainly does him a world of good to see Charmaine,” which stops me cold. My prayer, my heart.
“I’m sure it does,” says Dr. Osborne, just a moment later than he should.
From the back seat I follow Phoebe’s gaze out over all the horse farms, which could really be one big horse farm that goes on and on, for all I know. Half the sun is still burning on the horizon, large and pink but watchable now, as the sun rarely is. I wonder if Phoebe believes it really would have done my father a world of good to have seen me, or if she knows for certain it would have made no difference at all. I can’t imagine who the lie is for, unless maybe it’s for Phoebe herself. And I wonder if lying comes easily to her or if she has to talk herself into believing what she says, like I do, and then work hard at ways to make sure it comes true.
Chapter 11
IN ENGLISH, MRS. TEADERMAN demonstrates how-to speeches by conducting an experiment. It starts with Friday’s freewriting assignment, a how-to paragraph for making a peanut butter sandwich. It seems easy enough when Mrs. Teaderman sets out a jar of peanut butter, a plate, a knife, and a loaf of bread on the demonstration table.
“Who wants to read their how-to while I follow directions?” she says.
The first boy tells her to put the peanut butter on the bread, and as if she doesn’t understand, Mrs. Teaderman sets the whole closed jar on the loaf of bread that’s still in its sealed plastic bag.
“No,” says the boy. “You know what I mean.”
“Use the knife,” says a girl in the first row.
“That wasn’t in the how-to,” says Mrs. Teaderman.
The second boy has used the word spread for the peanut butter, but he has not told her to open the jar, or to take out the bread. At this point, students are scribbling on their paragraphs, adding instructions about packaging and the knife. It’s tricky, because while “Make a peanut butter sandwich” is too general, as soon as you start getting specific with the details, there are more and more details to miss.
I am staring at an empty page, trying to decide if I should scrabble together a how-to or skip it to begin another letter to my father. Who may or may not be in better shape for visitors when we try again on Monday. Next to me, Kelly-Lynn has rushed through her paragraph and is hissing the words to the cheers she’s memorizing for tryouts.
People keep reading their how-tos, but not one results in a successful sandwich. Mrs. Teaderman beams at the frustration in the room. She has perfectly illustrated her point that what we choose for our speech might be obvious to us but completely unfamiliar to the rest of the class. Maybe Jeff Burns, and she gestures to a quiet, tall boy at the back, will tell us how he helps his dad change the oil in a car, and she, for one, wouldn’t even know where to find the dipstick. She wouldn’t, she says, even know how to pop her trunk open if Mr. Teaderman wasn’t around to help.
I watch my blank paper as if the right how-to words might appear on their own. How to make a peanut butter sandwich. How to know if your father will be okay. How to make sure the light of the Lord shines through you to someone else when you’re not sure you can even feel it yourself.
After school I find myself standing on my own front doorstep again, Mrs. Catterson admitting me into my own home. Today she has pulled her hair back in a clip and wears no makeup. Her face looks small.
“Come on in and make yourself at home,” she says, then claps a hand over her mouth. “I always say that. You know what I mean. Seth’s still with Doctor Osborne practicing something theatrical. You know, top secret.”
I nod politely, thinking that Seth and Dr. Osborne can have each other and their stupid play.
“I’m sure Seth wouldn’t mind if you spent a little time in his room while I finish the kitchen floor,” Mrs. Catterson says. “Maybe you have some things up there you’d like to check in with. I trust you’ll show Seth’s belongings the same regard he’s shown yours?”
“Okay,” I say, wondering what kind of regard he’s shown my things.
Upstairs, parts of my room look the same, like the yellow walls and Phoebe’s white childhood bed. But the floor is bare, the white sheer at the window is gone, and the white bedspread is gone, too. Instead there’s a navy blanket on the bed and a bed
sheet in a brighter blue strung across the window on a tension rod. In the corner is a trumpet on a metal stand, and my desk is covered with Seth’s homeschooling workbooks.
I close the door, and there’s the mirror on the back. I have not been alone with my full-length reflection since we moved. I lift up my shirt, then my bra. In just two weeks, my breasts look even bigger and rounder. Just as heavy as they feel.
I try not to see my hair. I’m afraid I will lose my will to let it grow long. As for my skin, Phoebe says I need to be more consistent with the soap and hot water and witch hazel and to keep my hands off my face. She doesn’t believe that I’m already doing everything she tells me and it doesn’t make any difference, since every time she extracts, I end up breaking out more.
I put my clothes back together and check for my wooden box under the bed. It isn’t there. It’s not on the bookshelf either. Everything I usually keep on my shelves has been collected in a crate and crammed into the corner of the room, and now the shelves hold Seth’s copies of The Chronicles of Narnia, his Hardy Boys series, his Bibles, and his dictionary. There’s also a copy of A Wrinkle in Time, which I know is not my own private book, but Seth has already taken over my room, and it doesn’t seem fair that he has A Wrinkle in Time, too.
When I open the door to the closet, the inside smells different. Like something I should recognize but don’t. It might be a pee smell, but I cannot believe that Seth, no matter how annoying he is, pees into my closet with his own clothes hanging right there. But boys do weird things with their pee, like Cecil’s friends at school with the lockers. Pee makes me think about penises, and then I am thinking how Seth’s is here with him, at all times, in my room. With its pee and other lust-related activities. It all gives me a weird feeling at the back of my neck.
I find my box on the top shelf of the closet, pushed in deep, next to the wall. I’m standing on the desk chair, stretching hard, trying to pull the box out from under a spare set of sheets, when my knee brushes something stiff and flat at the back of Seth’s hanging clothes. He’s turned a sweatshirt into a sack, cinching the drawstring waist all the way closed. Inside is a bunch of paper, maybe a script, bound with a big clamp. There’s a file folder too and a smaller manila envelope.
“Charmaine?” Mrs. Catterson calls from the foot of the stairs. “You doing all right up there?”
“I’m looking for my box,” I say, which is true. What I am also doing is grabbing the manila envelope out of the neck of Seth’s sweatshirt with one hand and reaching for my box with the other. I plop myself onto the desk chair and tuck the envelope firmly under my legs just as Mrs. Catterson opens the door and pops her head in. “Found it!” I say, lifting the box in her direction.
“You know, I wondered about that. I wasn’t sure what you used it for, so I put it away so nothing would happen to it. Accidentally. What sort of things do you keep in there?”
I raise the lid to show her, even though I would rather not. The first thing I notice is that my things aren’t taking up space in a way I understand, as if they’ve been handled and returned. This makes me feel a little better about hiding the envelope I’m sitting on. I hold up Daze’s bone fountain pen from Niagara Falls. Then I offer Mrs. Catterson the plastic baggy with the shaving of wood. “It’s supposed to be from the cross,” I say, “but it might be just a symbol.”
Mrs. Catterson takes it and turns it over in the fading light.
Next I hand her the postcard of Lot’s wife.
“A pillar of salt,” says Mrs. Catterson. “The perils of disobedience.” On some words, Mrs. Catterson’s voice gets thin and breaks into two wavering notes, like she’s trying to make a chord. Or like she has to cough, but she never does.
I flip open the notebook with my prayer, then flip it closed. I root around in the box for a pen and make another hatch mark on my thumb, quickly, before Mrs. Catterson sees. Inhabit me, O Lord God. “There’s mostly just some other stuff I’ve saved,” I say.
Mrs. Catterson sits down on the end of the bed. Even though she is a long, willowy woman without much fat, her hips spread out in a bony way, straining her stretchy pants. I don’t know what Daze would call her body type. “I just want you to know that I appreciate your being friends with Seth,” she says. “He doesn’t have friends here yet. And he misses Africa.”
“We’re not really friends,” I say, feeling guilty.
“Oh, I think you are. You’re both such bright children. I’m pretty sure Seth considers you his friend.”
“Did he tell you that?”
Mrs. Catterson smiles. “That’s not exactly the kind of thing boys go around saying, dear. To their mothers.” She scoots backward, farther onto the bed, lifts both her feet, and shows me the bottoms of her socks, which have leather patches sewn on them in the shape of soles. Shoe-socks. She twitches her toes toward each other and away, like a girl. “I’m guessing it’s hard on you not having your own room right now. On your mother too.”
“We’re fine,” I say. “It’s good to be a part of the county. My father says it’s a mission field in our midst. Like Ghana.”
“Well, not exactly like Ghana,” says Mrs. Catterson.
“Anywhere can be a mission field,” I say.
Mrs. Catterson unclips her hair, runs her fingers through it, then clips it back again. Under her eyes, the skin puffs out in soft, purple half-moons. She gestures to the marks on my thumb. “Are you counting the days until your father comes back?”
“Yes,” I say. I try to start the prayer again, but the question bothers me.
“When do you think that might be?”
I tell myself there’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Catterson asking, but it feels bad that I don’t have an answer. It makes me want to crack open my rib cage and say, “See? See? The secret is I don’t know any more than you do.” Which doesn’t make that much sense and which feels all wrapped up in other things I don’t know what to do with, like the crying at the residential recovery place that wasn’t even him, or riding in Dr. Osborne’s messy back seat.
“Mister Catterson and I have often discussed psychiatric care,” says Mrs. Catterson. “What the Bible might have to say about tinkering with the human brain. Whether that might be outside of God’s design for us or maybe a new capacity the Lord has given us, through the intellect, to take better care of ourselves. Like pasteurization. In a way.”
“No one’s tinkering with his brain,” I say.
“Tinkering’s probably the wrong word. I just mean that studying your father might help other people like him.”
“What do you mean, ‘like him’?” I say. “There isn’t anybody else like him. Every person is one of a kind.” I can hear myself breathing now, each breath bigger and more frantic, fighting its way through my shrinking throat. I am either going to cry or pass out or burst through my skin.
Mrs. Catterson scoots to the edge of the bed and plants her feet on the floor.
“My father is a man after God’s own heart,” I say, and when I look up, Mrs. Catterson is nodding.
“Honey,” she says. “Honey, of course. I didn’t mean to upset you.” She stands up in front of my chair and reaches her arms out like she wants to hug me, but I am not going to stand up. I can still feel the envelope under me, and whatever’s in it, no matter what, is going to be mine. She has to stoop over to hug me, and when she’s done I stay very still while she leaves the room and pulls the door almost but not completely shut behind her. I listen to the shoe-socks on the stairs, whose creaking is a sound so familiar that I would not have even noticed it before we moved out. Then I hear another sound I would not have said I cared about, that of the traffic at the intersection of Main Street and East, the steady slowing down and speeding up of engines at the two-way stop. At the edge of a black hole, time slows down. And if you could make it through a black hole to the other side, which you can’t, time might even reverse, and if I could make time reverse I’d go back and stay right here in my room, knowing that Phoebe and my father ar
e somewhere else in the house doing whatever it was they used to do that I didn’t pay enough attention to. Phoebe rolling her clean pantyhose into balls, maybe, or my father staying up all night, walking the streets of East Winder, receiving prophecy, and then coming home to record it for The Good Word. I want this so badly that I understand how they came up with the term homesick, though I don’t know if anyone has ever felt that way sitting in a room that is still, technically, her own. In social studies last year we studied immigrants, how in Europe during the war countries invaded other countries and took them over, with the invaders living in people’s houses and driving their cars and, our teacher said, much worse, with a look on her face that could only mean she was talking about rape, which Phoebe says is the worst possible thing that can happen to a woman. I always thought the people in the invaded countries would feel mostly anger about how unfair it was, and vengeful, especially if they had been raped. But what I never imagined is how sad they might feel. I would not have said that sadness could keep you sitting motionless in a chair, in a room that used to be yours, listening to things that you didn’t even know you missed. Things you wouldn’t have even said were yours to hear until after you discovered that they are not necessarily yours at all.
Even though it’s only five o’clock when Seth gets back from practicing with Dr. Osborne, it’s nearly dark from a rainstorm. Through a crack in the bed-sheet curtain, I see the electric cross on the water tower flicker on, and I have missed that too. My rear end is numb from sitting. I lift the top off my box again, with all the things in there that mean nothing to anyone but me, and I deposit the manila envelope inside. I don’t even try to cover it with anything else. I just close the lid, drag the chair back to Seth’s desk, and head downstairs.
“What were you doing up there?” Seth asks when I enter the kitchen. He’s already seated at the table, Mrs. Catterson pouring him a glass of juice, like he’s a little kid.
Lay It on My Heart Page 14